LOTRO: Why We're Here

A screenshot of Weathertop in Lord of the Rings Online, taken from actual play.Out of curiosity, ever since the first day I played LOTRO, back in August, I’ve been informally polling players in the game with a few questions. I’ve asked on open channels, I’ve asked the members of kinships and Fellowships, I’ve asked strangers and in-game friends. Most of the questions I ask are about people’s history with paper RPGs, but the question that gets ignored the least: “Why are you here? Why did you choose LOTRO?”

A lot of the people I talked to had strong, positive opinions about their choice of MMORPG. I was expecting most answers to somehow involve the global MMORPG superpower, World of Warcraft. Some answers did. But three of the answers I got the most often surprised me.

This wasn’t scientific. I’m not Pew. I was just asking around. A lot. These three answers stood out based largely on how often they came up, in one form or another, but also because of the lessons I gleaned from them.

“I liked the devs”

Outside of a few noteworthy development houses, like Blizzard1, I don’t see much developer-loyalty in video-game players. Even those who have favorites play games from lots of other developers. And a video-game company’s good rep seldom survives more than one mediocre title.

More to the point, I wasn’t surprised to hear it about Turbine. Prior to DDO, I hadn’t heard of them as a company even though I’d heard of Asheron’s Call. (Never played it.) DDO was, despite some charms, not a winner for me.

But inside LOTRO, Turbine seemed to have quite a few fans, so they’re doing something right. How many of these fans liked the developers from a previous game, and how many liked them just from the online presence leading up to LOTRO’s launch (as I did)? I don’t know, but it seems developer loyalty is enough to get $15 a month out of people who could be playing practically any MMORPG out there.

I’m curious to know how many Turbine fans would be playing LOTRO because it’s a Turbine product if it wasn’t set in Middle-earth or some typical fantasy setting. Is DDO popular and I just don’t know it?

“New games mean friendlier players”

“I should be happy that I have such good friends,” Frodo tells you in LOTRO.At first, I couldn’t quite sort out the meaning here. I took these responses to mean that a game has friendlier players when the game itself is still young. After a few weeks, I got it through my head.

What people were trying to tell me was that newer games — meaning games newer than World of Warcraft — tend to have friendlier players. The popular notion seems to be that griefers and scumbags migrate and stick to WoW, like flies to flypaper. (To be fair, lots of nice people stick with WoW, too. They are the clover honey that attracts the barfing flies.)

What I want to know is why WoW has such a volume of negative players or why LOTRO has such a high percentage of friendly players? Is it illusory? Are all the nice WoW players in happy Guilds like hippy communes, never coming out to mingle with the drab masses? Is it a side-effect of the sheer volume of WoW players? Is it just another case of an obnoxiously verbal fraction? (If that’s the case, what makes the verbal fraction on LOTRO so neighborly?) Are the WoW servers I played on flukes? Are all of us playing LOTRO just delicate, lily-livered dandies?2 Is it WoW’s more cartoonish visual style or aggressively aggrandizing PvP components?

Truth is, I don’t know. What I do know is that LOTRO has a reputation within its own community for being a friendlier game. Less pressure. Less bullshit. Fewer people around trying to churn real cash out of the game.

Will it last? LOTRO is seven-months and three-expansions old, and the reputation persists. We get spam from gold-farmers, sure, but the behavior of genuine-play persons seems much more civil. The game feels more “mature” (fair to be read as “dry” or “stuffy,” as this is Tolkien after all, but also to be read as “relaxed,” “nuanced,” and “without so many foul-mouthed pre-teen scumbags”), but is that the chicken or the egg? I’ve been surprised more than a few times to discover this or that player is fifty-years old or fifteen. It’s about behavior more than age.

“I’m a Lord-of-the-Rings junkie”

This is the answer I was expecting, and I imagine Turbine was expecting it, too. I got this one a lot. Still, I misjudged things here, and found the answers didn’t quite match my expectations. A lot of the people I talked to hadn’t migrated from WoW because they liked Lord of the Rings — they were giving MMOs a shot for the first time, with LOTRO, because they loved Middle-earth.

I thought the Lord of the Rings license (like the Conan and Warhammer licenses) was hoped to lure players out of WoW and deeper into the MMORPG marketplace, like paper-RPG licenses hope to snag a percentage of D&D players. I’m surprised at how often I meet all-new MMORPG players who’ve been drawn in by the game world.

This is interesting for me because, while I can get giddy about “meeting” Gandalf3, same as anybody, I’m not a huge Tolkien fan. I didn’t read Return of the King until the movie was imminent. I really don’t like that last movie. Loyalty to authentic Tolkien lore isn’t a serious component of the game to me — I respect that the developers have gone as far as they have to honor the material, but also that they’ve found a way to scratch (however lightly) the itch for a wizardly character class. (Jeff may have more to say about that from his time on another Lord of the Rings RPG.)

I’m here to see the stuff from The Hobbit, but also to see how the creators have managed to expand the field without, you know, wandering too far afield. So my interest is extended by a curiosity borne of the source material, but I’m not playing the game just for Middle-earth. (We’ll talk more some other time about why I continue to play.)

I don’t buy into the argument that MMORPGs will destroy paper RPGs. The old-school games may shrink, but they can also gain new visibility from people who start playing MMOs and then discover they’d like to design their own adventures. They can coexist. I play both, and expect to continue doing so. (I play a lot more RPGs than MMORPGs, though.)What surprises me is that the hurdle between laypeople and MMORPGs can be overcome by a love of the setting. In my experience, paper-RPG producers just accept that while books may be sold to new customers based on a beloved fantasy world, new players are seldom made through such sales. The learning curve on a game like LOTRO (or WoW) seems like it’d be pretty steep when you could, instead, just read the books or watch the movies again. (Of course, I’m still pleasantly surprised to learn that six million people, or whatever it is that’s supposedly playing WoW these days, continue to find any RPG experience worth $15/month.)

Someone do the market research for me, please, and let me know how many folks playing LOTRO are there just to meet Legolas. How many play despite the fiddly, gamey details? How many come for the Hobbits and stay for the PvP or the XP grind?

Here, though, we see one of the baseline, gene-level factors in the appeal of MMORPGs over paper RPGs: The ability to live in a world you already love, even if just for a few minutes. Visiting Middle-earth through a collaborative story or adventure experience just isn’t as easy as running around the Shire in an MMO. Sometimes, you want to create a rich and compelling adventure, but sometimes you just want to go and see what they ended up making Aragorn look like. Sometimes, you just want to go to a fantasy land and not do anything. A lot of RPGs don’t do that very well because most RPG play-groups don’t do that very well. It’s best done alone, isn’t it?

As I am lately a frequent LOTRO player, I’ll be regularly writing about it. Have questions? Play the game yourself? Let’s here from you.

—1. Blizzard is the only company I know that can push release dates back into infinity and not lose sales or fans.2. That’s me.3. I was more excited to meet Radagast, actually, but this topic will be covered more later.

14 Comments

Mike Mearls
on December 21, 2007 at 8:19 pm

Point 2 resonates with me, as it ties into 50% of why I stopped playing WoW. So much of an MMO is rooted in the community. When finding groups became too bothersome, and after the nth time some mouth breather hassled me about giving him gold or helping him with some quest, I left the game.

I think you’re right on about griefers migrating to the biggest game. Also, to be a little blunt, 12 year olds sucked into WoW by the ads are not likely to fit in with what a 30 something like me wants in a group member. That’s another problem with being the biggest: your audience starts to move away from the hardcore, late 20s gamers that WoW started with.

Are you saying 6 million people play LOTRO or 6 million people play MMORPG’s all together?

Because if they are making 90 million bucks a month I need to get my ass started programming one of these games. Although getting a bunch of players fast enough to recoup startup costs would probably require a recognizable license like LOTR now that WoW has most of the players. I wonder how much they had to pay for the license, if they paid for it up front or if Tolkien, Peter Jackson, et cetera get 50% of all revenue or something.

A popular statistic went around a year or so ago, which said that WoW had six million subscribers (or thereabouts). In truth, there may have been six million accounts or something similar, but the number “six million” is what has stuck. Point is, a whole lot of people play WoW.

This number was a one factor that drove a lot of people to get into the MMORPG business, for good reasons (a la White Wolf’s desire to create it’s own next-gen game) and for bad ones (a multitude of company’s blind cash-grabs). Lots of MMORPGs are going to launch and tank in the next year. Some, like a recent Rome-themed game called Gods & Heroes, are going to fail just before launch because its cheaper than failing just after launch. (See the article and links at Penny Arcade)

Are these companies thinking they can make new customers? Draw away existing customers? How long do they think they can keep them? How do they plan to do that? Are they thinking at all? Answers, I’m sure, vary from canny to idiotic depending on which forthcoming MMO you look at.

I imagine LOTRO’s numbers are way, way lower than WoW’s. For one, LOTRO apparently needs fewer servers to provide for its audience. For two, the game is noticeably less populated (though it isn’t exactly sparse, like it was when i started). For three, there’s a vibe that keeps coming out of Turbine’s correspondence and marketing that says to me that their numbers are not what they expected or hoped. (This is not scientific.) They may have had unrealistic expectations based on WoW, too.

Regarding the license: I don’t know (or even have much of an idea) what Turbines terms are with the Saul Zaentz company for Middle-earth book rights, but I do know that the game has no license with New Line pictures. LOTRO is based on the books, just like the movies were. It’s not based on the movies.

But I think LOTRO can last, at least for a time. It’s a slow-burner, and it’s had a lot of expansions in just seven months. If they can keep the game world growing, like they have been, I’ll stick around to see what’s next. I’m not alone.

WoW has over 9 million subscribers worldwide. WoW was the first MMO to substantively break 2 million subscribers (a number which many otherwise intelligent people thought would never be broken).

It’s hard to say how much of that 9 million goes into Blizzard’s pockets because of the murky relationship they have with the Chinese government. As far as I can tell, China acts as a licensor and basically pays Blizz a fee, for which Blizzard “localizes” WoW into Chinese. By which I means; “Does what China says.” I don’t think a Chinese player puts any money in Blizz’s pocket. I think they pay China and China pays Blizz.

LotRO probably has around 200,000 subscribers. That’s just a guess, but MMOs basically fall into two categories. WoW, and 200,000 users.

This number was a one factor that drove a lot of people to get into the MMORPG business, for good reasons (a la White Wolf’s desire to create it’s own next-gen game) and for bad ones (a multitude of company’s blind cash-grabs). Lots of MMORPGs are going to launch and tank in the next year.

Replace “MMORPG” with “TCG” and you’ve pretty much got the same factual accuracy. I’ve noticed startling similarities between the two genres for quite a while. In fact, Jeff’s 3 reasons could apply to why many people get into TCGs, as well.

1. I liked the devs. “Hey, I really like AEG (or WizKids or WotC or Decipher), so I’ll try their new game.

2. New games mean friendlier players. Before we get into regionals, state championships, worlds, etc., and the cutthroatedness that go with them. Or, maybe you’re just sick of ultra-competitive players of your current game (equating WoW to Magic or Vs. here seems appropriate), and want to get into something new and, for the moment, more casual.

Bringing up the TCG parallel was something I was thinking about last night. I suspect there’s a legitimate economic comparison something like “solo computer games (console, PC, etc.) are to MMOs as traditional card and board games are to collectible card games.”

From the massive success of one or two, for example, we see many, many get-rich-quick band-wagon jumpers.

From what I know of how often second- and third-tier CCGs are barely break-even propositions on an ongoing basis, I wouldn’t be surprised if LOTRO and similarly tiered MMOs are just barely making it financially, if at all.

The idea that you can’t turn a profit with an MMO without Blizzard’s numbers is a crock of shit, frankly. Two hundred thousand people, each paying $15 a month comes out to three million dollars per month, more than a enough to fund a modest company that was designed with such goals in mind. It’s when studios start planning beyond their means, and convince investors that they can match WoW’s numbers, that things start to break down and games with otherwise decent playerbases get canned.

That’s exactly my basis for concern for LOTRO’s future, Zack. I wonder if the Lord of the Rings name and the popularity of WoW combined to create an unreasonable expectation for success. Is the cost of expanding this game not being paid off by the present player base? I don’t know, but with the volume of free expansions to date, I could believe it.

Two hundred thousand people, each paying $15 a month comes out to three million dollars per month, more than a enough to fund a modest company that was designed with such goals in mind.

You’d have to prove this to me with a spreadsheet that accurately reflects licensing fees, technology overhead, and advertising. And probably some pretty significant service on the debt the company racked up while they were building and testing the game, pre-launch.

You know, Jeff, I don’t think you’ll be surprised to learn that by the time WoW was released there was probably no one at Blizzard who knew how much it cost. A friend of mine who ran his own division there said he was pretty sure no one above him was checking his budget or numbers.

It’s no coincidence that the bestselling game in the genre…in many ways, the proof of concept for the genre, was produced by a company with so much money already, it didn’t need to keep track of where it went.

Blizzard is unlike any other company. The rules seem to just not apply to them.

As for Zack’s assertion that a 200,000-player MMO can be profitable, the best I can say under my NDA is that EVE Online was profitable well before its membership was anything remarkable, and that Zack knows what he’s talking about.

The difference, of course, is that EVE was created without the same level of expectations, without licensing fees, and without the bulk of a company already maintaining an Asheron’s Call and a DDO. It was a lean company. So I don’t know if LOTRO can be sufficiently profitable with 200,000 subscribers at $15/month, but an MMO can be.

There was a great deal of extremely fuzzy accounting with Blizzard, WoW, and Vivendi, including a huge amount (my source says around $60M) that was essentially written off as “pre-development” back when Vivendi had little confidence in the product (a couple of years prior to release) and was trying like mad to sell of their online division.

The actual number of subscribers is also extremely difficult to ascertain, for the reasons of China (as Matt mentioned above) and the equally fuzzy system of accounts in Korea (one of their biggest Asian communities), where individual WoW accounts aren’t the norm… instead game salons have thousands of accounts to accommodate players who pay hourly fees to play.

Puzzle Pirates, according to Daniel James (who has been extremely open with the numbers and seems like an honest person), had a modest budget and fairly solid returns based on initial subscribers, which became an outstanding profit margin when they switched entirely to the “pay for in-game currency” model.

The “pay for tokens” (which become in-game assets or access to content) model is the default Asian model, and is something almost every North American publisher is looking into as the inevitable future.

Shanda (the largest Chinese publisher of online content) was the last to experiment with a monthly subscription model in Asia, and found it to be a complete disaster. At the most recent Online Game Development Conference in Seattle, a rep from Shanda said that they would never publish another game that wasn’t free to play, pay for extra content, and seemed certain that every other Asian publisher would follow suit.